Drabbles and Dirges: A Tribute To Small Things
by MonsieurBrightside
Summary: A series of short musings and poems behind the humans and creatures we have encountered.
1. Tui and La

**Tui and La**

_There's definitely, definitely, definitely, no logic to human behaviour  
. . .  
There's no map  
And a compass  
Wouldn't help at all._

-Björk

* * *

She is her, and yet. . .

She is not _her._

La knows this, and yet he cannot bear the thought of her not loving him as Tui had loved him-though she still has mortal debris, making such a desire impossible. Yet, he tries.

He tries to woo her, and is met with a cool aloofness.

He pulls himself to her, and is pushed away. There is imbalance, this cannot go on, and something must be done.

Dejected by her silence in response to his endeavors, La lashes out, saying things to her he will regret later. Infuriating still, she does not pay him the slightest bit of attention, merely stares out, past the stars and the water, to the land. She is looking down at _him_. The human. She was favoring that mere scrap of life, too short and stupid to even appreciate the blessing of a single _thought_ of hers-

It galled his spirit.

La breaks. He rages and swells, threatening to surge up to her, envelope her in watery rage and drown her. Yet restraint and gravity keep the threat on edge.

"You stupid girl! He is impermanent! Unstable! Look how he is so quickly forgetting you and seeking comfort in another! What is the love of a mortal compared to that of divinity?"

She turns to him then, and spares him the briefest of glances. Her eyes, pure blue, shining with the celestial light behind them; filled with all the light of the cosmos, fill him with a sadness he has never known before. She turns away from him again, the sadness a cold memory and La wishes that she had not looked at him at all.


	2. Somnambulant

Somnambulant

"_Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht."_

(Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.)

-Albert Einstein

* * *

"This is revolution!"

How many times has that word been cried out? The characters strung together, and then streamed through the minds and hearts of many and few? It was not the chanting that would haunt him years later. Not even the screams. It was the blood flowing out of their bodies and into the mud, like ink onto parchment. It occurred to him, somewhere in the back of his mind, that this was how history was made.

He was hurt, badly. Blood, his blood, was spurting from a wound in his side. He ignored it as another soldier came into view, green and yellow armor glinting in the sunlight. Hate filled him, clouding his senses in red; his pain was nothing more than an echo. The soldier, one of the few who were not benders, came for him. The young man moved when hid enemy did.

His attack was as quick as it was brutal.

The soldier lay at his feet, the side of his head crushed inwards, blood and brains oozing. He inhaled the acrid air, letting the hate and fear wash through him and take control.

This was what they were fighting for. The boy was only twelve, and already he had seen his people suffer at the hands of these foreign dogs. They took their lands, and made them no better than slaves.

He felt a surge of energy, like a wave crashing against the sand, then receding back into the ocean. He allowed his rage to quell enough to recede with it. They were retreating.

As they ran, Pathik spared one last glance at the very first man he had killed-

And found that he was not much of a man at all. What was left of his face could not have been more than fourteen.

* * *

"I am sorry, but you were the only one alive when we found you." Pathik closed his right eye, the one that was not already covered by bandages, and tried to shut out what the strange old man was saying, to let the darkness take him.

He no longer felt hate for the ones who had slaughtered his people, only loss, and a deep, profound despair, "you should have left me to die with them, then." His voice was raw.

"It would be better if I had died with them, instead of being the only one left." A cool, frail fingers traced the exposed skin of his forehead in a soothing gesture. He could feel his brittle bones through the thin flesh.

"You remind me of someone."

Though he was silent, Pathik could not help but be curious. Who could this old monk, far away from war and hate, possibly think of when he saw _him_?

"His name was Aang."


	3. Wake Up

**Wake Up**

_If the children don't grow up,  
our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up.  
We're just a million little god's causin rain storms turnin' every good thing to  
rust._

_-The Arcade Fire_

She had been waiting for it, a chance to let the anger, and misery, and helpless despair pooling in her for so long flow out from her and into the one who had caused it all. Katara was finally alone with the prince, neither of them really willing to fight the other. It was her chance to ease the swell in her, _to let him have it_.

Oh, and did she let him have it.

Katara remembered his silence, his few indifferent replies, and the barriers holding the swell back broke, letting it crash out of her, and collide against him. Her chest heaved with the first sob, and she was powerless to stop it.

"The Fire Nation took my mother from me!"

She had not meant to say it, but now that she had, there was no way to turn her sadness into moxy again.

_It was in that moment Fate bound them with a single thread that would never snap. _

"That's one thing we have in common." He had a mother. Of course he had a mother. Everyone has a mother.

Why did he have to say that?

Suddenly, his indifference seemed more like a quiet despair, his scar. . . It looked so painful. She had never realized how young he looked. . .

Oh, she wished he had not said that. She should have chosen her words more carefully. She should not have said anything at all; because, now Katara could not think of the prince as the face of the enemy, as a firebender, as a soldier.

Now, she could only think of him as some poor mother's son.


	4. When We Were Hummingbirds

**When We Were Hummingbirds**

_I guess we'll just have to adjust. _

With my lighnin' bolts a glowin'  
I can see where I am goin' to be  
when the reaper he reaches and touches my hand.

_-The Arcade Fire_

It never really occurred to the Dragon of the West until just now.

He was old.

He was no longer _getting_ old, no, at some point in time, he had reached that stage that was not measured by age, but by something else, and somehow did not realize it. For a moment, he had felt surprised. Wasn't someone supposed to tell you these things?

Now that this had occurred to him, he did not quite know what to do with this new information.

. . . Just keep on keeping on, he supposed.

* * *

War had taken its toll on the old general. The constant battles. The sight of death and suffering of soldiers and civilians, from both nations, plucked at his heart strings. The death of his only son ripped a gaping hole into his being that he knew he would never fill again- No matter how many useless trinkets he bought, trying to find his boy's face in them.

...And truthfully, he did not want to.

* * *

It did not take Iroh long to realize that War was not the only thing that would rob him of the people he loved. At some point, he had forgotten that Life would take just as many.

* * *

It occurred to him that no matter where he went across the seas and into faraway exotic lands, there would always be some invisible pull back to the places that made him. Without realizing it, the threads of Fate lashed out, and bound him to the most unlikely of places. It held a power over him, and with only the slightest of tugs, it could pull him- flying from one end of the world to the next, and he was powerless to stop it.

It happened to him in the fire citadel, where he received his first kiss from his childhood friend, the only girl he ever truly loved- but would never marry, where the girl, now a priestess, presided over the wedding ritual of his first wife, where he stood, an unknown figure in the crowds of priests, as a mourner at her funeral. He let all the words he had not spoken burn to ash with her.

_It would happen again, years later, as he ascended the steps to the palace of Ba Sing Se, as a humble tea servant._

* * *

It was a hot, late afternoon in a war room, as he watched his nephew stand up and open his heart to the generals and Lord of the Fire Nation, when Iroh learned that Life and War was essentially the same thing. This newfound knowledge did nothing to ease his despair.

But then again, nothing really did.

* * *

"It's hopeless!" Tears were streaming down his damaged face as the boy wept, the muscles in his arms and back seizing with sobs he had long ago given up swallowing. Iroh could not recall a time he had seen the boy openly weep. (Zuko was fond of disappearing to some unknown place when the urge overtook him.)

It was then that something stirred inside of the old general, it sparked to life, burst, and burned his grief away.

"It's not hopeless," he heard himself say, as he placed a hand on the prince's shoulder, causing him to give pause and gaze up at his uncle with one questioning eye.

He could not explain it, but somehow they both knew that that one, insignificant comforting gesture was the start of something much, much greater than them.

_You better look out below._


End file.
